Paper Clippings The Blog of The Crossroads Cultural Center

Paper Clippings, more than a classical blog, is a service providing valuable reading material in order to help readers reach a judgment about current affairs. Comments and discussion are more than welcome.

It is true that our culture is swamped with moralism. But the reason is not just an historical quirk, it is what the Pope in Regensburg called "reduction of reason." If morality is separated from knowledge and reason (the human quest for meaning), all that is left is arbitrary power...

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness.

We have often wondered about the naive faith in the benefits of technology which has swept the education words over the last ten years. The truth is that spending billions in computing equipment is relatively easy, while forming good teachers is very hard. It is even harder when there is not much philosophical clarity about what it means to educate.

who never had a Catholic thought in his whole life. Joshka Fisher is so representative of the 1968 generation in Europe:a) A Catholic.b) Who was taught a completely moralistic understanding of his faith (still today he identifies Catholicism with a Manichean good vs. evil world view).c) Who thus embraced a utopian ideology completely removed from the realistic Catholic view of the human condition (Glucksmann is right!).